The Shawshank Redemption was filmed mostly in Ohio: Shawshank State Prison is the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, the opening trial is the Wyandot County Courthouse in Upper Sandusky, and the final beach is on Saint Croix.
The route follows Andy Dufresne from his trial to the Mansfield prison, the woodshop where Red hears Figaro, Brooks's halfway house and the Caribbean beach that stands in for Zihuatanejo.
Groundhog Day is set in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, but it was filmed almost entirely in Woodstock, Illinois, around the town square and the Opera House.
A weatherman arrives for the real February 2 festival and wakes up to the same day again and again. The route follows the film from its Pennsylvania setting to the Woodstock square, the diner, the hotel tower, a railway museum and the quarry where the cliff scene was shot.
Ben-Hur's Jerusalem, Nazareth and chariot arena were filmed in Italy: Cinecittà Studios in Rome for the 1959 classic, and Matera and Cinecittà World for the 2016 remake.
The route follows the story from Jerusalem and Nazareth to the sea battle, the great chariot race and the Valley of the Lepers, and shows where each scene was shot. Most stops are stand-ins for the story's places, and each says so.
The legend of Shuten-dōji, the ogre-king of Mount Ōe, is tied to shrines and temples in and around Kyoto: Iwashimizu Hachimangū, Sumiyoshi Taisha, the Ōeyama range, Byōdō-in and Nariai-ji.
In the story, abductions plague the capital and the warrior Raikō leads a band against the ogre-king. The route follows the hunt from prayers at the shrines to the lair, the beheading and the places that claim the head or the sake. Versions differ, and the exact mountain is disputed.
Roald Amundsen's Gjøa expedition of 1903–06 was the first to sail through the Northwest Passage, from Beechey Island and Gjoa Haven in Arctic Canada to Nome in Alaska. Today the little herring boat sits in the Fram Museum in Oslo.
The route follows the voyage stop by stop: the Franklin memorial at Beechey Island, two winters at King William Island, a long ski trip to the telegraph at Eagle, the arrival in Nome, Gjøa's decades in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, and her return to Norway.
In 1612 a Nizhny Novgorod merchant, Kuzma Minin, and Dmitry Pozharsky raised the volunteer army that cleared Polish forces from the Moscow Kremlin. The route follows it from the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin through Yaroslavl and the Trinity Lavra to Red Square.
The five stops trace the militia's march and the monuments to its leaders. The Yaroslavl pin marks the city, as the sources name no building.
Hans Christian Andersen's Denmark runs from a cobbler's house in Odense to the Royal Danish Theatre, the colourful quay of Nyhavn and the bronze Little Mermaid on Copenhagen's Langelinie.
The route follows the shoemaker's son who left Odense at 14 to become an actor; a theatre colleague told him he was a poet instead. Two Odense houses, three Copenhagen landmarks and a ride at Tivoli show where his life and his stories touch the map. The birthplace house is traditionally identified, not proven.
Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms follows American ambulance lieutenant Frederic Henry from Gorizia and the retreat from Caporetto to the Grand Hotel at Stresa and a mountain house above Montreux. The war, the retreat and the flight over Lake Maggiore are the backbone of the book.
The route follows Frederic's path from the Italian front to Switzerland. Most pins are approximate, since the novel names towns and rivers rather than buildings; the hotel in Stresa is the one exact stop.
The X-Files is set in Oregon, Alaska, Washington State and Pennsylvania, but it was filmed around Vancouver: in Queen Elizabeth Park, at Riverview Hospital in Coquitlam, at Delta Air Park and in Chinatown. The show remained in Vancouver for its first five seasons, and its 2008 film returned to British Columbia.
The route follows seven episodes and a film, from the pilot in 1993 to I Want to Believe in 2008, and pairs each scene with the British Columbia place that played it. Some scenes were shot in a specific building or clearing the sources do not name, so those pins are approximate.
Yellowstone is set in Montana, but the Dutton ranch house is the Chief Joseph Ranch near Darby, Montana, and much of the rest was filmed in Utah, in Park City and Ogden, before the shoot moved to Missoula.
The route follows the production from August 2017 near Darby and at Utah Film Studios, through Utah stand-ins for Montana, to the move to Missoula in 2020. The locations are listed in filming order, not story order.
Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood were shot around Los Angeles, from a Hawthorne diner to Musso & Frank on Hollywood Boulevard.
The route follows the three films in release order: the diner and boxing venue of Pulp Fiction, the Del Amo mall and strip joint of Jackie Brown, then Musso & Frank, Larry Edmunds Bookshop, the Bruin Theater and the Simi Valley ranch of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Several sites are gone or rebuilt, such as the Hawthorne Grill and the original Spahn Ranch, and the pins mark the filming locations.
Bond's Japanese mission was shot largely on location: at the Kuramae Kokugikan sumo hall and Hotel New Otani in Tokyo, at Kobe Docks, at Himeji Castle and on the volcano of Shinmoedake in Kagoshima. Filming ran from July 1966 to March 1967, and most of the locations are identifiable.
The route follows Bond from a sumo tournament in Tokyo to the Ama fishing village and the volcano base of Blofeld. Many of these sites can still be seen, though the Kuramae Kokugikan has since been demolished and the SPECTRE base interior was a Pinewood set.
Bayside Shakedown is set in Tokyo's fictional Wangan Precinct, and its real home is Odaiba: Fuji Television's headquarters, the island and the Rainbow Bridge that gives the second film its title.
The police comedy began on Fuji TV in 1997, the year the network moved to Odaiba, then a half-empty district. This route follows the show from the studio to Tokyo Teleport Station, the shot-in-Shiomi precinct and a Kyoto road junction that doubled for the bridge.
From 1968 Carlos Castaneda published best-sellers about his apprenticeship to don Juan Matus, a Yaqui sorcerer from Sonora: peyote, power, and finally a leap into an abyss. They came out as anthropology and earned him UCLA degrees. Most scholars now read them as fiction, and the author reinvented his own life story too.
This route follows two maps at once. One holds the places the records confirm: Cajamarca, Lima, UCLA and Westwood. The other holds the places the books name, from a Greyhound depot in Nogales to a bench in Oaxaca and the Toltec warriors of Tula. Each stop's accuracy label tells you which map it belongs to.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided opens in a half-built Dubai hotel, moves to a near-future Prague, and ends at a London summit. The game's city is a fiction: Prague is compressed into three invented districts, while Dubai's hotel and London's Apex Centre do not exist. But each stop stands on a real place, and this route follows the story from Dubai to the Vltava and the Thames, using the real cities, the real model for Golem City and the real Alpine range as anchors.
The six stops follow the main mission order, from the Dubai prologue through Prague, Golem City and the Swiss Alps to the London finale.
Two love stories shot in guerrilla style across Hong Kong in 1994: a policeman who buys cans of pineapple while he waits for a month to end, and a girl at a fast-food counter who sneaks into a policeman's flat.
The route follows the plot from a Tsim Sha Tsui nightclub to a block of guesthouses, then across the harbour to Lan Kwai Fong and the Mid-Levels escalator, and ends at Kai Tak, the old airport in Fallen Angels. Chungking Express stops are filming sites; the Midnight Express pin is approximate.
The legend of Kitezh, the Russian Atlantis, says the city sank into Lake Svetloyar rather than fall to the Mongols. The route also visits Gorodets on the Volga, said to be Little Kitezh, and Kideksha near Suzdal, the name's folk origin. On calm days, they say, its bells can still be heard.
The route follows the story from the folk etymology of the name, through the town said to be Little Kitezh and the forests of the Kerzhenets, to the lake itself and the St Petersburg stage where the opera first sounded. Kitezh is a legend: the places are traditional identifications, not proof.
Slam Dunk follows Hanamichi Sakuragi, who joins the Shohoku High School basketball team to impress a girl and turns out to be a natural. Its Shōnan coast is real: a railway crossing from the anime opening, a seaside station renamed for a rival school, and the beach where the film ends.
The route runs from the Kamakurakōkōmae crossing to Kugenuma Beach in Fujisawa, with the model for Ryonan High School and the Hiratsuka gymnasium on the way.
Nine years after a night in Vienna, Jesse is on a book tour in Europe when Céline walks into his reading in a Paris bookshop. He has an hour before his flight, and they spend it wandering the city. Richard Linklater's 2004 film plays in real time: the story lasts about as long as the film, roughly eighty minutes.
It was shot in 15 days across Paris, and its locations jump about more than the dialogue admits. This route follows the film's order from the Left Bank bookshop through the Marais and the east of the city to the Seine and a gated courtyard in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.
In 1986 the teenage martial artist Ryo Hazuki comes home to the family dojo in Yokosuka and watches his father, Iwao, die at the hands of Lan Di. Swearing revenge, Ryo follows the killer to Hong Kong in 1987 and on to the mountains of Guilin, and the two games turn that trail into one long walk through a living town, a harbor, a crowded Hong Kong district and a walled city.
The route follows Shenmue and Shenmue II in seven stops. Dobuita Street and Kowloon Walled City are real places the game draws on, the dojo and Bailu Village are invented, and every stop says how closely its pin matches the game.
Studio Ghibli's worlds feel lived-in because Miyazaki went to look at real places: a Welsh mining museum for the village in Castle in the Sky, Visby for the town of Kiki's Delivery Service, the harbour of Tomonoura before Ponyo. Other links are only rumoured, and he has denied at least one, the town of Jiufen in Taiwan for Spirited Away.
This route follows eight films in release order, from 1986 to 2008, and pairs each with the real place reported as its inspiration. Only some of these identifications come from Miyazaki himself, so every stop says whose claim it is, and none of them is a filming location.
Bond's final outing opens beside a lake in Norway and closes on an island in the Faroe Islands, with a long detour through southern Italy and a retirement in Jamaica in between. The story's geography is real: Matera's cave lanes, a bridge over the Gravina gorge, a railway station at Sapri, a waterfront house at Port Antonio, the Atlantic Ocean Road and the cliffs of Kalsoy.
The route follows the film's order — the frozen-lake flashback, the grave and the bridge, the Matera car chase, the farewell at Sapri, five quiet years in Jamaica and the 'Cuban' harbour that is really Port Antonio, then the Norway drive and the villain's island in the Faroe Islands. The beach house in Jamaica and the lake house in Norway were sets, both since dismantled.
Jurassic Park (1993) invents a dinosaur theme park on an island that does not exist, then shoots almost all of it on one small Hawaiian island, Kauaʻi. On 11 September 1992, the last scheduled day of the Kauaʻi shoot, Hurricane Iniki passed directly over the island and pushed one famous sequence to a ranch on Oʻahu.
Nine stops follow the film in story order: the garden of the opening attack, the stream that played a Dominican amber mine, the Kapaʻa waterfront that played a Costa Rica café, the falls every visitor flies past, the estate where the visitor centre façade stood, the gates below Mount Waiʻaleʻale, the canyon of the dead fence, the Gallimimus stampede at Kualoa Ranch and the garden where Grant finds the nest. Filming on Kauaʻi began on 24 August 1992.
Ron Howard's 2006 thriller, based on Dan Brown's 2003 novel, sends symbologist Robert Langdon and cryptologist Sophie Neveu from a murdered curator in the Louvre on a quest for the legendary Holy Grail — through a Paris church, a London Templar church and Newton's tomb to a Scottish chapel.
The route follows the film's trail in story order, from the Vitruvian-Man murder and the Saint-Sulpice marker to the Temple Church dead end, the APPLE cryptex at Westminster Abbey and the 'neath-the-rose finale at Rosslyn Chapel. Note the abbey scenes were filmed at Lincoln and Winchester cathedrals.
